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THE WEST’S
ELEGANT EASTERN LADY
Odessa is a busy Free Port, with fishing
fleets, shipbuilding, oil refining and other massive industries, international
commerce – and the biggest outdoor market in Europe. Despite
this, it remains one of the world’s most elegant cities.
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Classical Odessa |
Modern
Odessa was born only 200 years ago, on the ashes of an Asian Greek fortress,
rebuilt and repeatedly destroyed since the fall of Rome. The Russian phoenix
that rose from all those ashes has managed to hold onto the best that Nineteenth
Century European architectur could produce in its heyday. |
It did so while enduring the Crimean War, the
Russian Revolution, two World Wars and many interfering developers.
It is a
major city of independent Ukraine today, but remains as it has done since its birth - a cosmopolitan community with about 40 nations represented in its population. Odessa displays ‘a spirit of freedom and ironic humour’, according to its writers.
Alexander
Pushkin, who lived here in its early days in the 1820s, recorded even then that
“you can smell Europe. French is
spoken here, and there are (Italian, German, Greek) papers and magazines to
read.”
Indeed,
Odessa’s style pleases not only Europeans and Russians, but also visitors from
Eastern cultures and the West. Mark
Twain wrote of it in 1869: “It looked just like a (19th century) American city;
fine broad streets. . . wide, neat and free from any quaintness of architectural
ornamentation.”
He seems to have missed something – or possibly the classical and baroque ornamentation arrived in the
latter part of his century. In any event, Odessa’s chief architect was a
nobleman, who escaped to Russia in the French Revolution, and was appointed
Mayor of the Black Sea port.
Armand-Emmanuel
du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu, set about creating a city of culture and commerce
reminiscent of ornate Paris. Odessa’s
brief, checkered history has prevented it from the rapid development and
modernisation that Western cities have
experienced. Fortunately so, for the Black Sea port of a million people has
managed to preserved its peaceful elegance.
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The Opera house, theatres. . .
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We saw it
at its best – on a quiet, sunny Sunday, when the city-centre was silent, the
offices and the port empty, and the streets filled only with wedding
processions involving glamour and double-stretched limos; book fairs and
pony-rides in the park. We peered down
broad, tree-lined boulevards stretching along the coastline and inland. |
As far as we could see (which admittedly was
not very far) there was not a blemish on this idyllic state. Minarets and
bell-towers stood peacefully together; fountains and green trees and lawns;
golden-bricked broadways; a palace or two beside a cathedral and a grand opera
house. Outside the art museum, the pedestrian highway was pave with
pumice-stone from Mount Vesuvius.
Even the
port, at the foot of a grand staircase, is spotless. Unlike the town above it, however, it is encased in ultra-modern glass and concrete.
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As you
cross one of the flying pedestrian bridges that span the freeway between new
harbour and old town, you’ll see the railings bedecked with padlocks. These are
put there by couples – signaling either the end to their freedom or the
beginning of endless wedlock, depending on their mood of regret or hope. There
are even one or two succinct messages in English, such as : “Fun is fun. What
is done, is done!” |
Odessa's grand staircase tp the sea
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Couples do not
romantically throw away the key to their wedlock padlock – in the knowledge
that, if they separate and divorce, they must remove their personal marriage
symbol from Odessa’s aerial pedestrian-way.
Known as a
fine holiday resort, Odessa attracts many brides and, mostly, happy
honeymooners, apparently.
The city
also attracts culture-vultures.
Here is
just a taste of Odessa’s 170,000 artifacts in its archeological museum:
Cyprian
sculptures from 6thC before Christ.
A letter to
the citizens of Tyre.
Ancient
Grecian vases
Life-size
statue of a Roman general.
Terra cotta
oil lamps and exquisitely carved bronze keys
from the Bosporan Kingdom of 2.500 years ago.
Ancient
Slavic porcelain
An ancient
Egyptian sarcophagus
. . . not a
bad ancient collection for a 200-year-old town.
But its
recent history is equally cosmopolitan. In 1789,
Catherine the Great’s Russian army overran the Turks in the huge fortress that
had been built by the Ottoman Empire on older ashes. She renamed the settlement
Odessa, after the ancient Greek Odessos, and perhaps in memory of The Odyssey.
Soon the new city was the ‘capital’ of New Russia, and the Russian Empire’s
second biggest port. In 1875 Odessa’s
mix of European sophisticates and Russian proletarians produced the world’s
first Marxist organisation.
In 1905
Odessa’s workers threw their weight behind the mutinous seamen aboard the
battleship Potyomkin, anchored in their harbour. The naval mutiny sparked a civil war, and
the city was occupied variously by armies of the French, the Bolsheviks, Germans
and Austrians and by Ukrainian nationalists before it ultimately fell to the
Red Army in 1920.
Hardly
having time to recover from the famine and political transition that followed,
Odessa was engulfed in the Nazi invasion of 1941. Its citizens fought back in the streets – and from under
Though it lost most of its surviving Jewish citizens to Israel, and its Russsian
technocrats to Moscow after WWII,
Odessa survived Stalin, the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR.
the streets. By 1944 much of its population - 280,000 people; mostly Jewish -
had been massacred or deported.
Today
Odessa is Ukrainian, but retains its Russian title as a “Hero City”.
Heroic or
not, it seems a place definitely worth re-visiting.
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